We’ve already discovered how your client’s mindset around your product, service and offering affects the strategy you use to interact with them & persuade them to work with you. That’s called market awareness & it all comes down to this question:

Market awareness = Do people know this kind of service exists & do they want it?

Now, in Part 2, I’m going to reveal how your client’s mindset around your messaging impacts what they need to hear from you to know that you’re the right person for them to work with. The fancy term for this is market sophistication.

Together, these 2 posts will help you lay the foundations for everything you write in your marketing to get your clients to sit up and pay attention.

The most undervalued secret to persuasive online copywriting. And it’s just one question.

Sophistication = How tired are people of seeing the same old messages about this kind of service?

By now, you know your product or service like the back of your hand. And you know your market awareness because we covered it in Part 1. So without further ado…

The questions you need to ask yourself to figure out the ‘sophistication’ of your market are:

1. Is this service one of the first in its market?

You’ll fall into this category if you’re an industry leader. You’re solving your dream client’s problems with a completely new offering that’s never been seen before. The problem you’re solving can be a long held one, but the way you’re solving it is totally new & exciting.

There are no others like you (yet). Think: GoPro & Facebook when they first started.

How to hook them:

When no one has really seen a product or service like the one before, readers need to know immediately what it is. Copy-wise, this meant that simple, concise, and direct works, especially in the headline. Nothing more is needed because people have no idea what they’re really looking at until they keep reading.

Your innovation is enough to capture attention because you have no competitors (yet). Trying to be creative with headlines or hooks would do a disservice here. Clarity is key when you’re introducing something completely new.

A good example of this is when Apple introduced the iPod with the “10,000 songs in your pocket” messaging. There’s no confusion about what the iPod does or how you benefit from it, even though no one had ever seen or heard of an iPod before.

2. Is your service the second of its kind on the market?

You’ve already seen that someone has had great success in your niche & now you want a slice of the action. You’re releasing a service that only has one other competitor.

(And that’s fine – don’t let yourself be fooled into believing that all good businesses have to be the first of their kind. It’s ok to let someone else pave the way & prove that an idea works. It means there’s less risk for you when you follow suit.)

Keep in mind that we’re talking about newer products or services, but they can still be in competitive markets, like health or social media marketing. What matters is that your service is the second of its kind, even if your industry has been around for eons.

How to hook them:

Show them how your service is better than the one other option out there. Ways to do that:

Showcase how your offer is doing it better, faster, stronger than competitors.

Making bolder claims about your service (Just like, “Hands that look lovelier in 24 hours – or your money back!”).

Since your service is only the second of it’s kind, it means that there’s only one other source of messaging that you’re competing with. It gives you a lot of room for creativity – especially when you remember that the industry leaders are using clear, precise & concise messing (as mentioned in #1 of this list).

You can get a little more creative and dramatic in your copywriting and headline. Headlines here tend to promise an outcome and a meaty guarantee. Here’s a headline example from a hand cream product: “Hands that look lovelier in 24 hours – or your money back!”

3. Are people starting to become sick and tired of hearing the same old promises?

By now, there are lots of other “competitors” out there touting similar products or services to yours – the market is pretty saturated. This is where your audience is getting jaded about all the claims made by the growing number of folks selling variations of the same thing.

The underlying desire or problem that your offer solves is still there – people are still struggling with it & they still want to solve it. But they no longer believe the usual promises that they hear about services like yours.

So, if you’re in a market that is in this stage… are your marketing efforts falling on deaf ears because it’s just like everyone else?

How to hook them:

The old promises won’t work as well anymore because they’re overused. You need to separate your service from the rest of the ho-hum crowd & highlight what makes your offer different, better & worth working with. It’s time for fresh, new creative messaging.

Here’s a few ideas on how to do that:

use a headline that immediately captures attention by highlighting what makes your service different from the rest – and HOW it’s different, like “The secret is in the [special feature that your competitors don’t have]“.

use lots of strong testimonials to back up your claims & prove that they’re legit.

emphasise HOW your work is different & better than your competitors. What makes it unique? (You can have more than one unique factor here… the more the merrier.)

If you’re a designer, coach, or healer… do you have a proven framework, methodology or process that you created & use with your customers? Do they get mind-boggling results with it?

If yes, give it a special name and – Voila – you have found what makes you different, better & worth working with. A good example of this is Braid Creative, who have the Braid Method.

Essentially, you’re trying to say: Yes, you’ve seen lots of other services like this one, but this is different. This one is BETTER.

And you need to repeat that messaging over and over and over throughout your sales page.

4. Are people now so skeptical of the claims and promises from #3 that they think those promises are full of poo?

Your market is now so saturated that variations of the same messages seem to be playing on repeat, like a broken record. And lots of the companies making big claims have products that don’t live up to them – which makes your dream clients wary.

By this stage, your audience has heard the claims & promises made in Stage 3 over and over and no longer trust that those claims are true. They may have even tried some of your competitor’s products & been disappointed.

They have a lot of fear around buying yet another thing that won’t work or doesn’t do what it says it will do.

How to hook them:

You want to immediately lower their anxiety and fears around old claims and promises and products they no longer believe in.

This is where it becomes important to use the concept of “Even If…” headlines. Here are some examples:

Struggling to earn the kind of income you want – even though you’re working your butt off?

This course will help you heal your adrenal fatigue – even if you’ve been struggling with it for a decade & have tried everything under the sun.

Finally get the home that you’ve always wanted – even if you have no natural talent when it comes to interior design.

Get the support you need to finally make a profit from your business – even if you’ve already tried 50 billion courses & none of them worked for you.

You can’t rely on promising your service will deliver something specific for your dream client anymore. You need to prove that it does it easier, quicker, better and/or promise extra benefits. It’s time to focus all your energy on breaking down their objections, so make sure you know the objections inside & out.

5. Do people have every objection possible to your service & what it claims?

The cynicism is through the roof. Your audience knows so much about your industry, they will not buy into whatever you have to claim anymore.

You’ve got to put a completely new spin on your work.

How to hook them:

It’s time to be innovative, creative, and position the product completely differently than it’s been positioned before. How? By tapping into their emotional desires that relate to your product.

Your strategy should shift from focusing on your features & benefits to empathising with your dream clients. Identify with them.

You need to deeply understand the emotional elements that are driving them. What is really motivating their behaviour, even if they have every objection possible to your service & what it claims? What is their deep driving force?

For example, if you’re a health & fitness coach, your audience might be tired of hearing messages about losing weight, getting fit or being healthier. After finding out more about your dream clients, you might discover that they’re really motivated by wanting to improve their sex life & have their man (or woman) look at them they way he did when they first met.

So you might focus on the words women wish their guy would say about them. You could use those words in your headline. Like: “I can’t keep my hands off of her!” That’s a great headline to connect the offer to having better sex & genuinely tap into your audience’s true motivations.

Having success when your audience is in the 5th state of market sophistication comes down to deeply understanding your audience & their motivations.